Python, connectivity, diving … bits from OpenBossa

There is a lot of Python usage on Nokia Internet Tables and from INDT developers. When asked, about half the audience, so something like 50 people raised their hand for using and prefering Python. The new iphone-like Canola2 interface was done in 4 months of development, told one of the developers, Gustavo Barbieri. Realizing more features in less time, compared to Canola 1 in C. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems but overall they were quite happy. Kate Alhola also presented "Freemantle", the new alpha software release which apparently does all its rendering via OpenGL-ES2.0 (this is OpenGL for Embedded systems). This was a talk packed with technical details – what i got is that Nokia is going quite open about their intentions and software.

Marcel Holtmann presented a new linux connection manager which completely does away with networking scripts and automates a lot of management. One of its goals is to allow to have an IP address and efficiently work with DNS, without the need for 5 processes to startup first. It can handle IP connections via wlan, ethernet, gsm, bluetooth and works with a plugin arch. All core components are GPLed and User Interfaces communicate via the DBUS.

Then Hadi Nahari presented his view on mobile and cloud security. In his view, these two worlds have more security aspects in common. Hadi currently works a security architect for Paypal and previously did that for EBay. He pushes for talking and thinking about "End to End" security, and "security assets in motion". Looking at how my private information on a mobile phone is secured, how it moves from one execution environment to the next, is as important as looking how the backends handle this data. True enough, many of the recent problems actually arose in the backends, not the end user devices.

Apart from the relaxed schedule, i am enjoying the views and people here. I spontanously joined a group with Stefan Seefeld from CodeSourcery (he does Boost+Python bindings, was another interesting talk!) and had my first diving session. And i am scheduled to do my PyPy talk in 2 hours. Curious to see how that goes.